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Adobe Creative Suite Going Subscription-Only
First time accepted submitter JDG1980 writes "According to CNET and various other sources, CS6 will be the last version of Adobe's Creative Suite that will be sold in the traditional manner. All future versions will be available by subscription only, through Adobe's so-called 'Creative Cloud' service. This means that before too long, anyone who wants an up-to-date version of Photoshop won't be able to buy it – they will have to pay $50 per month (minimum subscription term: one year). Can Adobe complete the switch to subscription-only, or will the backlash be too great? Will this finally spur the creation of a real competitor to Photoshop?"
Adobe underestimates how much it benefits from piracy. If poor college students can't cut their teeth on the full Adobe suite, they're likely to learn how to use something else. When those students go out and get jobs, they're more likely to use what they're used to than drop a bundle on Adobe software they've never used before.
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The really interesting part of this seems to be that Adobe gets to keep all the money from the licensing. Previously, if you wanted a license, you'd go to some reseller, and they'd get part of the money, as would a distributor, and maybe ever a couple other companies along the way. This is basically a game changer. Adobe believes (and it's probably true) that it's popular enough that they don't need resellers and other people pushing their products, and that they can do good enough business just selling direct to the end user. As much as I like the idea of subscription software, I do like the idea of the middle man being cut out, since most of the time they offer very little value to the end customer, and can only really make prices higher, or at the very best, bleed out money from the process would have been better served going back to the people creating the product. It's the equivalent of music labels selling directly to end users without going through the music stores (be they online or physical stores/records)
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Considering AutoCAD's licensing, if Autodesk created a Photoshop competitor you'd wish they'd let you have it for $50/month!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
We need to have version control for some plugins we use. If there are no controls to prevent new versions from being loaded then it will be imposible to version control
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GiMP should be looking more and more attractive to professionals as this sort of thing goes
No, not to professionals.
GiMP should be looking more and more attractive to professionals as this sort of thing goes.
GIMP isn't even competitive with Photoshop CS2 (you know, the one Adobe has available for free downloading on their website...) It's a joke. Still no support for 16-bit per channel after all these years. (And before someone says that you can't see the difference, that's not the point at all – you need 16 bpc to avoid getting banding and other artifacts after repeated transforms. The final output can be 8 bpc, but editing/processing needs to be done at a higher depth for solid results. And even a $499 DSLR can shoot 14 bpc these days.)
The worst thing about GIMP is that its existence leads the FOSS community into complacency. People need to realize that there really is no good open-source competitor to Photoshop and start working on one, rather than pretending that GIMP fits the bill and then arguing with creative professionals who repeatedly point out why it doesn't.
I think this is a great opportunity for the Open Source Community to showcase what really can be done with apps like The GIMP. There is admittedly work to be done for vector apps, but they are coming along.... Other than using Photoshop specific filters, there really isn't anything Photoshop can do that I can't do in GIMP... Why pay Adobe for their overpriced bloatware?
For professional users a subscription makes a lot of sense
Why?
We're already seeing the usual rip-off pricing for non-US customers: Creative Cloud is currently just shy of £50/month in the UK, which works out at about two years to break even compared to the current advertised price for buying the key applications in CS6 outright (a little under £1,200).
I don't want to have my UI move around arbitrarily. I hate it when browsers do that. I hate it when mobile apps do that. I use Creative Suite to earn a living, and I won't tolerate those kinds of tools doing it.
I don't want to work more in the cloud. I have invested a considerable amount of money in building a high performance system here, with robust storage, networking, back-ups etc. And my system and devices don't trust anyone outside my company with access to material I'm working on for clients.
And most of all, I don't trust Adobe not to screw me. When my boot drive failed, they were the only company whose DRM couldn't figure it out and reinstall cleanly after the replacement was installed. It took weeks (and their tech support people who could barely speak English or understand the problem calling me literally in the middle of the night and then wondering why I wasn't impressed, and ultimately the first step toward formal legal action) to get them to fix the problem. As far as I can tell, that problem turned out to be due to completely fictional records somehow magically becoming linked to the serial number of our legitimate, legal copy of the product in their database, which sounds a lot like either an admin screw-up or someone's key generator coincidentally hitting our number, but certainly no fault of ours either way.
I predict with 100% confidence that none of my companies will be giving any more money to Adobe if they go ahead with this. They aren't trustworthy, their pricing model is predatory, and their track record of improvements/bug fixes -- or rather the unspectacular lack thereof -- doesn't speak well of how much value any of us are going to get out of renting our software. If we need more copies of CS for new people, we'll just source legal but second-hand permanent copies of the same version we've already got, as the courts in Europe seem happy that we are perfectly entitled to do.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
yeah.
why dont the mechanics just drive the racecars, too ?
I don't want to 'rent' software.
I'd heard that Adobe had just recently stopped selling their products on CD/DVD's and only had downloadable. I don't really like that as that I really prefer to keep physical install media, but I can live without if need be.
But, renting software, is unacceptable to me.
What happens after awhile if for some reason, I can't or don't wish to connect said computer to the internet to check in? I just go dark and that's acceptable?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
When GIMP finally has a single-window UI
It has. And fortunately you can disable that. Seriously, single-window sucks so bad only a Windows user (ie, without proper window management) could want it.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
>>You are now stuck on the current version of PS
So what? I use CS2 and while some of the new toys are cool, they're still just toys. There a some tools that might make my workflow a little faster, but nothing that is revolutionary. Certainly nothing that's worth the cost.
Also, the OP isn't betting his company on luck/hope. The software he purchased works. So where's the bet?
Don't click the update button then... no one is forcing you to take the updates, you're just a luddite if you don't.
The Luddites were against improvements in technology that would save lots of effort, increase efficiency, and therefore potentially make them redundant. I see no evidence that any recent "upgrades" in Creative Suite have had that kind of effect. They do seem fond of redoing their entire UI theme every couple of years, but there haven't been any must-have new features that were of more than niche interest for quite a while.
And that's the biggest problem with this whole scheme. We're talking about a pricing model where you basically have to pay the equivalent of full price every couple of years. Even on the old, one-off purchase model with a substantial up-front price, you only paid that once and you paid a much lower price if you wanted to upgrade to the next version. Something that is going to work out that much more expensive, not to mention having the risk of breaking at least once a month, has to have something serious in it for the market to make them want to shift, and I just don't see that happening given Adobe's track record lately. As the likes of Microsoft have found out recently, there is always at least one viable alternative for large, profitable customers who don't like your new offering: stick with the old one they already have.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Yea, it isn't a professional grade graphics tool unless you paid an obscene amount of money for it.
Obscene? $49.99 per month? Most people pay twice that per month for Cable.
If you're a graphic designer you can get by with just the creative suite for all of your software needs. That works out to about 31 cents per hour for Adobe software. You're probably charging your client $50-$100 per hour. So that means the software which enables your entire business to run is as little as 0.3%-0.6% of your billable rate.
Credit card servicing fees are 2.5% of a retail business' overhead. So to all the whining I just yawn. Does Creative Suite offer 31 cents an hour in value? Of course. The reason you won't see any backlash is because Creative Suite is ridiculously cheap even on subscription. @ $2.5 per day, it only has to save you $2.5/$75hr * 60 = 2 minutes of productivity per day. Using photoshop probably saves me 2 *hours* of productivity per day over gimp. It definitely saves me 2 minutes. So I could stop paying Adobe and lose 2 hours of productivity per day... or I could pay Adobe the equivalent of 2 minutes of productivity.
Using GIMP is incredibly expensive. It costs way more than $49.99 a month in lost productivity.